tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-198735022014-10-14T12:24:12.647-07:00Peering Blurrily...just peering blurrilyRandom observations--obvious ones perceived belatedly--on technology in society and for education.Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.comBlogger134125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-87868030458286642332014-10-04T13:37:00.000-07:002014-10-14T12:24:12.654-07:00The Last of the Last Policeman<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">World of Trouble: The Last Policeman Book III</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (2014) by Ben Winters </span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a 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"></a></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><span style="color: red;">Warning: chock full of spoilers</span></i></span></div><b id="docs-internal-guid-f72b2c36-dcd5-b80f-65ef-f90d6d1558ee" style="font-weight: normal;"><br></b><br><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Final in the series (</span><a href="http://janiceadams.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-last-policeman-and-last-of.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">review of first book here</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">), this book portrays the unavoidable end of the world by asteroid impact and the final page, where it finally arrives, does kind of give you goosepimples. Like in the other two books, Henry Palace is on a case, enduring bodily battering and risk of premature death to satisfy his obsessive detective compulsions. He’s the last policeman-- except by the end of book one he’s not really a policeman anymore as law enforcement departments everywhere have disintegrated and society is quickly breaking down. People drop their duties to pursue their “bucket lists” or just find someplace to hole up. Getting armed and hoarding are key to the second stage of preparation for the end, and in the last stage, people kill each other off to assure that they don’t have to share their boxes, cans, and water jugs stashed in their desperate dugouts.</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br></b><br><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Henry’s last case is to find his sister, Nico, which he does, after first finding another young woman, Jean, who was a fellow member of her save-the-world group (completely bogus, unbeknownst to them both), and who suffered a similar final wound--a slashed throat. Henry saves the first woman whom he found by following a trail of blood to the place in the woods where she lay almost dead. He’s too late for his sister, whom he finds a couple of days later. The story comes back to Jean, wielder of the serrated knife that ripped open both throats. She becomes the sole survivalist in the group’s Plan B haven, a well-plied and cement sealed basement her group had thought they’d all share--once the astro-scientist they were waiting for to offset the asteroid’s path turns out not to exist. </span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br></b><br><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A lot of bodies have to be removed from the basement first, and Henry has to bury his sister. Then he rides his bicycle away, leaving Jean as the solitary Plan-B-er, in place of the psychopath charismatic leader of the group who had planned that he would be the only last one. Henry doesn’t attempt to wreak justice. He has solved the case and there’s nothing left to do but return the jackhammer he borrowed from the Amish cement layer he’d tracked down who had sealed up the basement--and who also previously had shut him up in a barn to die (one of Henry’s many impossible escapes in the series). Henry goes back to the isolated farm and sits down to a last dinner with the Plain People family who, except for the patriarch and a daughter who would have really enjoyed her </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rumspringa</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, if the world had gone on, have been spared knowledge that their last hour has finally arrived.</span></div><br><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Asteroid image borrowed from:&nbsp;<a href="http://theweek.com/article/index/238170/how-wed-really-deal-with-an-armageddon-sized-asteroid">http://theweek.com/article/index/238170/how-wed-really-deal-with-an-armageddon-sized-asteroid&nbsp;</a></span>Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-58538591898641585722014-07-02T15:04:00.003-07:002014-07-15T14:14:09.734-07:00The Imperfectionists: a story of the life and death of the news in print<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; clear: left; color: black; float: left; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Imperfectionists</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (2010) by Tom Rachman</span></div><b id="docs-internal-guid-720d68e7-f914-b538-1da9-0843b8bea84f" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><a href="http://ts1.mm.bing.net/th?&amp;id=HN.608050108117421380&amp;w=300&amp;h=300&amp;c=0&amp;pid=1.9&amp;rs=0&amp;p=0" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://ts1.mm.bing.net/th?&amp;id=HN.608050108117421380&amp;w=300&amp;h=300&amp;c=0&amp;pid=1.9&amp;rs=0&amp;p=0" height="200" width="200" /></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The construction of this novel is a little unusual, though not particularly related to its subject-matter, which is the inner working, birth, and death, of an international English-language newspaper published out of Rome. The story is told via individual portraits of people working at the paper: from a free-lance reporter; to an obit writer who gets promoted to Culture editor; to the Chief Editor; a would-be foreign correspondent; a copy editor; a dedicated but years behind reader; the CFO; and, finally, the Publisher, who is the inept and uninterested grandson to the paper’s founder. Each chapter gives a view into the person's life that reveals his or her existence beyond the paper--whether detached from work or unable to detach. At the end of each chapter, Rachman reels out the separate narrative of the paper’s founding up to the present day and its closing. The final installment, set in 2007, shows how each of the people moves on: into retirement, or other jobs, other careers.</span></div><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is the elephant in the room, and Rachman shows its inevitability, but how technology is killing the print news industry is only mentioned in passing--or, rather, as technology is passing the print&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">newspaper and leaving it in its dust. The paper is shown to grow and atrophy in cycles over its lifespan, depending on the support of the owners and the level of caring/ability of the publisher. It is like watching one of those videos showing the speeded up morphing of hairstyles/lengths on the same person over time, or of a timeline that swells and thins like a boa digesting meals over its lifetime. It is the way of print news that we have yet to see play completely out, but that is on death row, it seems, especially in a case like this newspaper that resisted changing to embrace web characteristics--wouldn’t even introduce color pages--and had no web site. As the song goes, video killed the radio star, and video has pretty much killed the reader, too.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm not sure who the imperfectionists are: whether the humans who created the paper, or we who would read it. Both, I guess.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><br /><br />Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-29635330457718064212014-06-22T18:44:00.001-07:002014-07-15T13:40:11.932-07:00Don't close The Circle!<br /><div style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></div><br /><span style="font-size: large;">The Circle by Dave Eggers (2013)</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />My first impulse as I read this book was to close my Facebook account. Of course, that has been my impulse several times before--yet I check FB several times a day, most notably before I go to sleep (which I just read, no doubt in an article someone posted to FB, that the blue light of digital devices makes sleep&nbsp;harder to come).<br /><br /><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/9e/The_circle.jpg/220px-The_circle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The circle.jpg" border="0" height="200" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/9e/The_circle.jpg/220px-The_circle.jpg" width="140" /></a>But then I thought, "It's a novel, a dystopia. Of course it's not what's really happening (it is), so of course I won't quit FB and of course I can't go off the grid. Just like of course I can't grow my own food or give up my car." Am I being self-defeating with such lack of confidence that I could do what I set my mind to do based on ideals, or just defeatedly realistic?<br /><br />I got a phone call from a dear friend today and it had been <i>years</i>. But I knew a little of her life from pictures she posted once on Facebook. She is the opposite of a power-user, so there's not a lot I can see of her life, but it was a colorful chunk that kept her alive for me. I don't post much either: mostly cute videos of cats. But also the occasional picture of my own cat and maybe my foot or leg or the background of a room in my house. And, what articles I post and things I "Like" and share do build up a profile of me. There are a few pictures of me online, too. So could I be physically found using facial recognition software and these clues of where I live? In <i>The Circle</i>, one individual who tries to get off the grid is found and run down within 20 minutes by web users and various search, surveillance, and social media tools. Scary stuff since it's not entirely fictional. <i>1984 </i>(Orwell's book) in 2014, or whenever Eggers' book is set. It is definitely not much in the future if at all. And The Circle is clearly an amalgam of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple.<br /><br />I've been waiting for the new iPhone to come out. I take my phone from room to room with me. I use it to cheat on crossword puzzles. I look&nbsp;up&nbsp;stuff while watching tv and movies. I book doctor visits, order meds by mail, reserve books from the library, all online. I don't rate stuff much, but I do look at ratings. Now I'm supposed to be trying to get customer reviews for my husband's business to improve its presence online. I really didn't know there were so many sites like Yelp where people went to find businesses. I hate all aspects of marketing, but especially having to self-market. My downfall at my last job.<br /><br />Fortunately, my husband's business is doing just fine as I dawdle about enhancing our online presence. It is a neighborhood business with mostly local, walk-in customers. It's his personality that makes for his success. Why can't we be content with good word-of-mouth? Why do we need to be rated, then have to suffer trolls who hate for the sake of hating? That's a premise of <i>The Circle</i>: the eponymous company was started up to get people to abandon anonymity so that the web would be a more civil place. This spirals out of control to the extent that even the company's founder wants to shut The Circle down.<br /><br />Eggers' story unpeels our digital life pretty accurately. It exposes the sneaky, slippery dangers that we all are uncomfortably, to some degree of consciousness, aware of. Eggers portrays the phenomenon of multi-tasking, which is something I used to be quite proud that I could do, and even promoted myself&nbsp;as being good at&nbsp;in my big job interview. I've since come to value the skill of uni-tasking, of just sitting and thinking, doing nothing else. I've always objected to listening to iPods while out on walks, insisting that we should be listening to the birds and the crunch of our own footsteps. Yet I do get antsy if I'm not always taking in data, and usually more than one stream at a time (e.g. surfing the web while watching tv). We humans do this: we did even in the pre-digital age. But we should heed Eggers' warning about taking on a third, fourth, even ninth screen at our desk. We should be leery of being <i>required </i>to monitor social media as we work, as opposed to it being tolerated/deemed an acceptable part of work as is sometimes the case now. We must resist having our value designated by a number rating. And we must be satisfied with real friends and not crave the approval of unknown hoards in the etherweb. Eggers makes his case.<br /><br /><a href="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/06/18/article-2661374-1E9D4FA000000578-346_306x423.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Unchained: Meriam Ibrahim, the mother-of-two facing the death sentence in Sudan for becoming a Christian, was released from jail today" border="0" class="blkBorder img-share" src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/06/18/article-2661374-1E9D4FA000000578-346_306x423.jpg" data-track-pos="0" height="200" id="i-bc749ba22720b749" width="144" /></a>~<br /><br />Here's the story of Meriam Ibrahim, the Sudanese woman who has been freed based on international outcry. Illustrates another aspect of The Circle that is true: <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2665929/BREAKING-NEWS-Sudanese-mother-sentenced-death-converting-Christianity-freed-international-outcry.html">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2665929/BREAKING-NEWS-Sudanese-mother-sentenced-death-converting-Christianity-freed-international-outcry.html </a><br /><br />Also, here's some <i>real</i> writing (by David Sedaris)--about a biometric surveillance bracelet as shown in <i>The Circle</i>: <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/30/140630fa_fact_sedaris">http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/30/140630fa_fact_sedaris</a>Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-71303485131891423592014-05-13T13:03:00.003-07:002014-07-02T15:06:05.424-07:00Todays Meet Learned about this site for instant back channel comm from Stephanie Delaney's blog:&nbsp;<a href="https://todaysmeet.com/">https://todaysmeet.com/</a><br /><br />Thanks, Dr. D!<br /><br />Here's a link to her blog, "Social Media for Higher Ed Leaders"<br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2VZKASPAsc&amp;feature=youtu.be">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2VZKASPAsc&amp;feature=youtu.be&nbsp;</a>Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-35716820449075230792014-04-06T15:55:00.001-07:002014-04-06T15:56:20.963-07:00Writing Commons and other online resources for teaching pre-college writingWriting Commons (<a href="http://writingcommons.org/#.U0G2gccdc70.blogger">http://writingcommons.org/#.U0G2gccdc70.blogger</a>): A free, comprehensive, peer-reviewed, award-winning Open Text for students and faculty in college-level courses that require writing and research.<br /><br />Here are a couple of other links to online textbook replacement resources:&nbsp; <br /><a href="http://open4us.org/find-oer/#GeneralSearch">http://open4us.org/find-oer/#GeneralSearch</a><br /><a href="http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/opentextbookcontent/open-textbooks-by-subject/englishandcomposition">http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/opentextbookcontent/open-textbooks-by-subject/englishandcomposition</a><br /><a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Rhetoric_and_Composition">http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Rhetoric_and_Composition</a><br /><br />Serious ebook contender for fall:<br /><a href="http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/bookhub/reader/2403?e=fresh-ch02#fresh-chab">http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/bookhub/reader/2403?e=fresh-ch02#fresh-chab</a><br /><br /><br /><br />Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-84609025884809053742013-09-03T12:54:00.000-07:002013-09-03T14:23:13.077-07:00Review of Cooked -- Another food "bible" by Michael Pollan<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; clear: left; color: black; float: left; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (2013)</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by Michael Pollan</span></div><b id="docs-internal-guid-1aaa6ce1-e55a-ffef-a8cf-444bf0fbe4be" style="font-weight: normal;"><br><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another amazing book by the author of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Botany of Desire</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Omnivore’s Dilemma</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cooked </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">continues the complicated, dramatic story of food. Like in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Botany of Desire</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which tells the in depth histories of 4 manipulative plants: apples, potatoes, tulips, and marijuana, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Cooked </i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is broken into the 4 elements: fire, water, air, and earth, and Pollan presents just one or only a couple of processes within each division. </span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><a href="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41VKzhj8L6L._SY346_PJlook-inside-v2,TopRight,1,0_SH20_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41VKzhj8L6L._SY346_PJlook-inside-v2,TopRight,1,0_SH20_.jpg"></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For Fire, we learn about the process, history, and scientific background of whole hog barbecue. Just the writing about it would make the most righteous vegetarian lust to find an authentic barbecue outlet and stuff slow-roasted, caramelized and smoky melange of pork shoulder, ham, and cracklin’ greedily into the mouth. What I learned was that authentic barbecue is a mixture of meat from all parts of the hog, including shards of glass-like cracklin’, which is the pig skin that has been roasted at the end. Also, the “sauce” is created during the mixture of the meat: a large quantity of apple cider vinegar is sloshed over the meat, and other spices and seasonings are sowed in by the handfuls. And that “barbecue” means pork, and the term is not authentically used to refer to grilled beef, chicken, or other meat. Pollan writes at length about how cooking promotes community and human connection, but nowhere as much as in the barbecue section. The aroma of it draws people to it, like the smoke finger in a cartoon.</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Water section was most territory of </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;">my cooking</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It illuminates stews and braising, and starts off with a discussion of the sofritto, sofrito, or &nbsp;mirepoix (Spanish, Italian, or French) flavor base consisting of sauteed (whether caramelized or just “sweated”) onions, garlic, and carrots, celery, or, in the case of Pakistani cooking, ginger. Actually, the &nbsp;chapter begins with the zen of chopping onions (“when chopping onions, just chop onions”) and the science behind why we cry. As with slow-roasting barbecue, the secret to cooking meat with water is low and slow too. &nbsp;Here’s where the Crock Pot, that can be left all day unattended, is the cook’s go-to tool: a pot on a stove or in an oven needs to have somebody sticking somewhat nearby. Pollan makes a convincing case for one's own cooking vs. microwave eating of corporate cuisine in this section, if one needed to be made. &nbsp;His synesthetic writing makes the mouth water and makes me want to get out my Italian cookbook and make spaghetti sauce. In fact, he includes a recipe &nbsp;in the back of the book for each of the 4 elements and the one for Water is Bolognese sauce. </span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The recipe given for his Air section is for his Whole Wheat Country Loaf &nbsp;including the recipe for the sourdough starter. No commercial yeast in this recipe, and he writes at length about the ambient microbes that are so effective for raising the dough. I’d like to try it despite how dependent on luck it sounds it is getting a good starter started. He begins this section by writing about and apprenticing with Chad Robertson who makes famous Tartine Bread in San Francisco. &nbsp;He is the quintessential artisan baker--one of a few Pollan interviews and probably the &nbsp;most aesthetically motivated of them all, as he favors the flavor and appearance of his bread possible using white flour above the nutrition yielded by whole wheat. We learn that the problem with whole wheat is that is weighs down the airiness of the dough and the “tiny knives” of the wheat bran cut the gluten’s balloonlike effect, resulting in a heavy, dense loaf. &nbsp;Whole wheat can also be bitter, which is why commercial bakeries, like the Hostess Wonder Bread factory Pollan toured, add lots of sugar: to hide the flavor and lots of other stuff to get the desired airiness result.</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fermentation, the last section, is also fascinating. It is divided into&nbsp;3: vegetable, animal, and alcohol. The vegetable fermentations produce sauerkraut, kimchi , and pickles. Next, animal: Pollan describes the artisan cheese-making process in detail, focused on Saint-Nectaire, made by Sister Noella starting with raw milk and finishing with cave-aging. He explains the action of the beneficial live cultures that compete out any toxic microbes, as shown by a demonstration Sister Noella gave to a French health inspector in which she injected, side-by-side, her raw milk culture and a pasteurized milk culture with e-coli. After a waiting period, the latter tested as fully contaminated, while there was virtually no remaining e-coli in the raw milk culture. This convinced the health inspector, who allowed Saint-Nectaire to continue to be made as it always had been. Pollan describes the stinking smell of some cheeses to high heaven, which reminded me of a common cheese in Denmark that smells just like strong, fresh urine, which must be a familiar breakfast aroma to Danes.</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The end of the Fermentation section covers brewing, and particularly beer-making, which I learned is far more difficult and variable than wine. The variables are of sweetness (i.e. alcohol proof) and additives, and it sounds as though experience and luck are needed by the home brewer to get a good batch. Pollan arrived at a recipe/process that he uses to make his “Pollan Pale Ale” but he also admitted that he only makes it once a year and that artisan breweries make good beer, like, apparently, the Sierra Nevadas he keeps stocked in his fridge.</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The recipes he provides at the end of the book are for 1) Pork Shoulder Barbecue; 2) Meat Sugo (“Bolognese” or “Ragu”) and Pasta; 3) Whole-Wheat Country Loaf; and 4) Sauerkraut, or as he also calls it, “kraut-chi.” I’m not sure I’ll try any of these, but I will get out my authentic Italian cookbook and try my own sauce, with our home-grown tomatoes. Also, I feel much more informed now about real barbecue and will be on the lookout for it, and I’ll get sourdough starter breads when I see them, like at the farmers’ market. I’ll try raw milk cheese, which PCC carries, and watch for fermented veggies to add to my diet. I’ve been a natural yogurt eater all my life, so will continue to get live culture plain, whole milk yogurt. I learned a lot from reading this book--and confirmed that a lot of my food practices/choices have been right.</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Cooked </i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is thoroughly researched and Pollan provides footnotes throughout and a comprehensive bibliography at the end. It is another Pollan “bible” on how humans can be most healthy and how it is nature, not corporations, that feeds us right.</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I marked several places in this book, but, as I read a library copy, had to remove my little paper strips before returning it. I’m lazily passing on recording all the bookmarks I made, but here are a few:</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Step Three: Salt the Meat; Then Brown It</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (in the “Water” section) -- Pollan cooking expert, Samin, said, “Use at least three times as much salt as you think you should.” She explained that “salt brings out the intrinsic flavors of many foods and can improve their texture and appearance.… In the case of meat that will be stewed or braised, you can’t salt too soon or too liberally. At least one day before cooking was good; two or three days were even better.”</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the “Air” section (p. 332, large print edition):</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Some researchers attribute the increase in gluten intolerance and celiac disease to the fact that modern breads no longer receive a lengthy fermentation. The organic acids produced by sourdough culture also seems to slows our bodies’ absorption of the sugars in white flour, reducing the dangerous spikes in insulin that refined carbohydrates can cause. (Put another way, a sourdough bread will have a lower “glycemic index” than a bread leavened with yeast.)”</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 416: “And, white or brown, I look for breads that have been fermented with a sourdough culture; the word “levain” indicates as much. And I stay away from any bread containing any ingredient that isn’t the name of a grain or salt.”</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the “Earth” section, p. 462: “While cruising the book tables, I spotted and purchased a thick self-published volume titled, refreshingly </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">non</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">euphemistically, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bacteria for Breakfast: Probiotics for Good Health</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The author, a pharmacist living in Pennsylvania, patiently laid out the case for the myriad health benefits of fermented foods and “probiotics”--the beneficial bacteria, most of them lactobacilli, often found in those foods. These “good bugs” and their by-products were credited with all kinds of good works, from improving digestion, reducing inflammation, and “educating” the immune system, to preventing cancers of the gastrointestinal tract.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“It turns out there is a substantial body of peer-reviewed science to back up all these claims, and more generally give credence to the age-old belief, shared by many cultures, that fermented foods confer special benefits on our health.”</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 484-485 (photos--click on it to make it larger) on probiotics to fight inflammation and “metabolic syndrome,” such as Type II Diabetes:</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PjHhlFWELCo/UiY8G0K4HsI/AAAAAAAAAYs/CfKogq65CRU/s1600/pollanbook1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PjHhlFWELCo/UiY8G0K4HsI/AAAAAAAAAYs/CfKogq65CRU/s320/pollanbook1.jpg" width="191"></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4LSAQ5vGGJU/UiY8ObiFJmI/AAAAAAAAAY0/du7s_p-ZWiQ/s1600/pollanbook2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4LSAQ5vGGJU/UiY8ObiFJmI/AAAAAAAAAY0/du7s_p-ZWiQ/s320/pollanbook2.jpg" width="214"></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br></div><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://janiasea.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-particular-sadness-of-lemon-cake.html" target="_blank">See my review of Aimee Bender's <i>The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake</i>...</a></span><br><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Citation</span><br><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4d4d; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;">Pollan, Michael.&nbsp;</span><i style="background-color: white; color: #4d4d4d; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;">Cooked: a natural history of transformation</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4d4d; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;">. San Francisco: Thorndike Press, 2013. Print.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span>Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-16462729404118192502013-01-12T10:07:00.000-08:002013-01-12T10:30:48.314-08:00Liberation and the Slick Six: A view of America's steam punk future<span style="clear: left; float: left; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://steampunkcostume.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/steampunk_golddd_ss_by_steampunkoverlord-d30gwo5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; font-style: italic; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://steampunkcostume.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/steampunk_golddd_ss_by_steampunkoverlord-d30gwo5.jpg" width="213" /></a><i>Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America</i><b id="internal-source-marker_0.5530383265577257" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><i> </i>by Brian Francis Slattery</span></b></span><span style="clear: left; float: left; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.5530383265577257" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">It took a long time for me to read this, and even at that I skimmed, skipped, then backtracked a lot. It’s not an in-bed read, or at least you can’t proceed quickly that way, even if you are an insomniac. It kind of needs to be read sitting up.</span></b></span><b id="internal-source-marker_0.5530383265577257" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In my coffee house notes, written on the library Hold slip with my name on it, I wrote first:</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Part Joyce</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Part McCormac</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Part “Lost”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t know about the Joyce part as this is time expansive, not condensed to all one day like <i>Ulysses</i>. But to me it had a similar quality of excruciating detail and meandering. It certainly has the wild west brutality of McCormac--not quite as slippery-with-blood pictorial but definitely steam-punk western. And it has the time and place shifting quality and “black smoke” dimension of the TV show “Lost.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When the economy collapses, so does the government and the US rapidly returns to its untamed state, along with all the collapsed countries of the globe. It’s a Libertarian’s dream: no government; no systems of distributions; every man and woman (those remaining who didn’t starve to death) for herself while standing vigilant against marauders. </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Parks and Recreation’s</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Ron Swanson. Weapons essential; fitness and “skills” a must. Life is cheap.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Part of the difficulty of reading this in bed is there are so many characters. They're in groups and tribes and all moving all over the country and the globe using horses, ships, broken and patched vehicles running on fumes, and trains partially navigating cracked and clogged tracks. As verdant nature reclaims the earth, juicily growing up around the debris of civilization, people return to a “third world” subsistence: “poverty” and living off the land, repurposing the shards of metal and plastic left over from the excesses of the past.</span></b><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.999999046325684px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></b><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.999999046325684px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh, and I forgot to mention the return of the institution of human slavery.</span></span></b><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.999999046325684px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like every western, there are guys in white hats and guys in black hats. Ardvark is the evil emperor of New York; Marco is flawed loner hero, and Doctor San Diego is the Zen philosopher. There are also the spunky indian squaw and the icy super-efficient and loyal office administrator. Archetypes, any? There’s a comic strip and a movie series in here somewhere.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Author’s website at </span><a href="http://www.bfslattery.com/"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://www.bfslattery.com</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. &nbsp;</span></b><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Image borrowed from </span></b><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://steampunkcostume.com/page/5/" target="_blank">http://steampunkcostume.com/page/5/ </a></span></span></span>Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-1399376873361057482012-12-08T19:59:00.000-08:002012-12-08T20:02:37.087-08:00Lectures as homework; "homework" during class timeNot only is it beneficial to students to provide podcast or vodcast lectures that they study at home, it's a benefit to the teacher, who then doesn't have to repeat the same live lectures class after class and can spend facetime with students much more productively.<br /><br />Listen to this short podcast on NPR about podcasting for the classroom:<br />More Teachers 'Flipping' The School Day Upside Down,&nbsp;by Grace Hood<br /><a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/12/07/166748835/more-teachers-flipping-the-school-day-upside-down">http://www.npr.org/2012/12/07/166748835/more-teachers-flipping-the-school-day-upside-down</a><br /><br />I've advocated for this to teachers who "lecture," not using the technology myself because--I thought--I don't lecture in my writing classes. But I do, albeit perhaps more briefly. I have a few stock lectures that I repeat every quarter, so I'm going to finally do this myself. More time for group writing, student board work, peer review, and conferencing.Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-54416243455591945042012-11-12T14:02:00.001-08:002012-11-14T12:29:22.001-08:00Cory Doctorow practices what he preaches in Pirate Cinema<a href="http://craphound.com/pc/cover-small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="cover" border="0" src="http://craphound.com/pc/cover-small.jpg" /></a><b id="internal-source-marker_0.6875223603565246" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pirate Cinema </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(2012) by Cory Doctorow</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This &nbsp;tale of how to overturn a socially repressive law in England’s oligarchic parliament, which could as easily be the U.S. government, is told like an oral story related in a roach-passing (or “spliff” in British parlance) circle. There are lots of gushing admissions of pride and euphoria by seventeen year old runaway, panhandler, dumpster raider, squatter, pirate video maker, or “filmmaker,” as Trent, aka Cecil B. DeVil, calls himself. And he <i>is </i>a gifted director and editor, though it’s not film, in this technology-native inhabited, net gen world, where kids can cobble together their own computers, build websites without a thought and create QR codes to drive traffic to them, deploy encryption and find all means of eluding detection by the powers that want to watch or catch them, and use software and hardware to create their own art. They expect to use what’s out there and now it’s come down to a fight against the giant entertainment corporations who can use political party whips to flog into being laws they want, even against the MPs’ own judgement and the entreaties of their constituents. Copyright policing is getting hard core--internet access can be cut as punishment without trial, people arrested and jailed--and the public’s freedom and privacy are on very thin ice.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All Cecil wants is to show his creative and crafted video remixes of clips from the films of Scot Colford. When he learns of passage of a new law that could get him thrown in jail for doing that, he posits the argument that it is legimate for him to use copyrighted clips as material for his videos because <a href="http://janiceadams.blogspot.com/2011/06/are-you-plagiarism-fundamentalist.html" target="_blank">nothing is original and no art is completely new</a>. So art should not be curtailed in favor of profits. He defines creativity as “doing something that isn’t obvious” and says that everything new is just remixing. In a speech at a rally, Cecil’s sister points out that science didn’t truly exist until people started to share their findings, have others test and peer review them, and post them to the public domain so that others could build on them. Cecil hates to be asked why he doesn’t pick up a camera and film his visions directly, to which he replies that, partly, it’s a bother when his material is already there. Scot Colford is both the medium and the subject of Cecil’s vids. But Cecil also illustrates his artistic rationale using the example of a sculpture he used to admire, which appeared to be made completely of found antique objects. But when it was pointed out that many of the objects were not really found, but were fakes, reproductions made expressly for the sculpture, he could no longer appreciate it. He felt its beauty had been achieved by cheating. So this showed how the Colford clips were, for his work, more authentic even than something he would film from scratch.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There’s also the argument that internet access has become a necessity of life for everyone, not only kids who want to download and upload, and therefore should be deemed a right. It is now nearly impossible to survive in society without it.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The pirate culture these kids create is highly idealized. Aside from Cecil, who makes his beautiful and effective vids, there’s Rabid Dog who makes comedic horror videos, also out of purloined clips, and Jem, who is an inventive street urchin and squat scout, paints murals, and makes the most superlative coffee ever imbibed. Cecil’s girlfriend is both an anarchist rave organizer and grade A student who lives with her “cool” parents. Her name is “26,” she’s both artistic and techy, political and learned, and a love goddess, too. And there’s Aziz, who somehow rules over a vast warehouse of salvaged electronics and other gear, though it is never revealed how he acquired the space (is it a squat?) or how he has the time both to scrounge for the salvage and to catalog it, let alone make anything with it. They all live by their wits in their own moneyless society, yet, still in their teens, have managed to develop the aesthetics of gourmands along with their individual sharply honed talents and skills. There are mouth-watering descriptions of their dumpster-dive meals, their coffee filtered in a sock, and the bathtub beer brewed by 26’s step-father, who happens, handily, also to be a barrister. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The characters speak in youth slang and in stagy supposedly Shakespearean argot. They are highly articulate despite being teen dropouts, and Cecil’s speeches can command the ardor of thousands. And they have <a href="http://janiceadams.blogspot.com/2011/12/open-sourced-civilization-beauty-of.html" target="_blank">a work ethic to show up the Mennonites</a>. “Work work work,” Cecil thinks to himself as he sits at his editing suite. There’s fetching and carrying at every turn, to retrieve food from the tips of their favorite upscale markets, to set up their sewer cinema, and to rig their biggest coup--the one that gives them the win against the copyright pigs. Their energy is itself an irresistible force.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pirate Cinema</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a very fun read in a Dickensian sense, and there’s lots to learn from it, too, about how to survive on the edge, how to build computers and evade surveillance, and how to rally support for a mini-revolution. Luddites may struggle (I semi-skimmed some technical descriptions) but there’s a lot in this book that is the real world now. </span></b><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I borrowed the copy I read from the library, but Doctorow is practicing what he preaches by making his art free to the public. Download <i>Pirate Cinema</i>, courtesy of Cory Doctorow--Woo!--and note there's a "Donate" link, too.&nbsp;</span></b><br /><a href="http://craphound.com/pc/" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">http://craphound.com/pc/</span></a><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Also, this just in:&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/14/google-transparency-report-2012_n_2130494.html" target="_blank">Google Transparency Report Shows Government Surveillance On The Rise In 2012&nbsp;</a></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Huffington Post &nbsp;| &nbsp;By Britney Fitzgerald Posted: 11/14/2012 3:11 pm EST Updated: 11/14/2012 3:15 pm EST</span><br /><br />`Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-41634718118121591922012-11-06T17:29:00.001-08:002014-07-02T15:06:28.516-07:00Unbuckling Time: The Age of Miracles is very quietly scary<a href="http://www.princetonscoop.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/daylight-savings-time-e1299585516777.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.princetonscoop.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/daylight-savings-time-e1299585516777.jpg" /></a><b id="internal-source-marker_0.9171503463294357" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Age of Miracles</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (2012) by Karen Thompson Walker</span></b><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.999999046325684px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Posted this on Facebook: </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I got up early AM to cough downstairs so as not to disturb spouse. Reading The Age of Miracles about earth slowing down. Weird going back up to sleep some more at dawn with light/time out of whack. Happy DST!</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I meant </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">End of </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">DST-- the switch back to Pacific Standard Time. I was in the middle of this book about the death of life on earth due to slowing of time on the day we, in real life, unlatch ourselves from time and relatch into a different hole--to suit our fancy. We make time suit our purposes, which is fine as long as the planet goes on rotating as it’s been doing and doesn’t start lagging and dragging resulting in our days and nights getting increasingly longer and longer until finally plants can’t grow because they can’t survive so long without light, birds can’t fly, because of changes to gravity or because they are most sensitive to the magnetic shift that also is occurring, and the tides go out farther, and come in farther too, swamping the beach mansions and turning them into tide pool mansions.</span></b><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Julia, a 12 year old girl, tells the story, amidst the trauma, also, of middle school, having no friends, and being in love with a cool skateboarder boy, who loves her back, then succumbs to “The Sickness.” This is a truly disturbing story, because it is so plausible, and because it is unstoppable and irreversible. There’s no big explosion at the end, like in the movie </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Melancholia</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. There’s only the gradual degradation of everything that’s normal in real life, to the extent that at this moment, my having just finished the book, I still look out and see the deeply overcast Seattle day with its glowing light, so different from the sunshine we had during the dry summer, and feel a little off kilter. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the story, the sunny sky eventually becomes lethal (as I’ve always disquietedly thought it is) from high radiation and people have to, at first stay indoors all day behind black out curtains, then under a metal shell over the house, or underground. The landscape looks like Mars, with only the etched evidence of life that was--all food has to be grown artificially. Social chaos (depicted in more detail in </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://janiasea.blogspot.com/2011/09/coupland-gets-didactic-in-girlfriend-in.html" target="_blank">Girlfriend in a Coma</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) and suicide (a theme in </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://janiceadams.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-last-policeman-and-last-of.html" target="_blank">The Last Policeman</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) reign. The cultist “Real Time” people, who reject “Clock Time,” have to come in from their lotus-eater desert retreats as their rebellion collapses. It worked for a while for them to sleep ever longer nights and stay awake through long sunny days, rejecting the government’s imposition of an unlatched day that runs on the old 24 hour schedule. But as days lengthen to 60 hours and longer, the degeneration goes too far even for them.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Age of Miracles</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a straightforward story. It shows what happens when humanity can no longer control the environment. It doesn’t try to explain how the tipping point came, what caused the planetary slippage. But it shows how some events are bigger than our ability to adapt and catastrophe can descend suddenly.</span></b><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Image borrowed from </span></b><a href="http://www.princetonscoop.com/princeton-nj-weekend-happenings.html">http://www.princetonscoop.com/princeton-nj-weekend-happenings.html</a></span><br /><br />Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-30544259528194900272012-10-25T16:29:00.000-07:002014-07-10T20:23:41.059-07:00The Last Policeman and the Last of Everything<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-t5zpTlDGyh0/UInJrmHk8-I/AAAAAAAAAXQ/DcCILzHMRYY/s1600/picasso.death.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-t5zpTlDGyh0/UInJrmHk8-I/AAAAAAAAAXQ/DcCILzHMRYY/s200/picasso.death.jpg" height="154" width="200" /></a><b id="internal-source-marker_0.5741965698543936" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Last Policeman (2012) by Ben H. Winters</span></b><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b></b><b style="font-weight: normal;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b></b><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">More detective novel than dystopia, though the story does emit a flickering pulsing, like that of a dying heart. Actually, that light touch is most effective here, because while reading, and now after finishing the book, I’m haunted by the feeling that we actually are unknowingly awaiting an asteroid too, one that we can do nothing to turn away. It doesn’t matter at all if Obama wins, or Romney. The Watchman’s Rattle (<a href="http://janiceadams.blogspot.com/2011/11/i-believe-costa-and-shermer-that-whats.html" target="_blank">Rebecca Costa</a>) is hissing and the self-interested 1% (<a href="http://janiceadams.blogspot.com/2012/10/ows-where-are-you-obama-is-at-least.html" target="_blank">Chrystia Freeman</a>) are already controlling the fate of us all. Not to mention, the ice cap is almost melted. Winters portrays society in <span style="font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Last Policeman</span><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> as very little different from the one in which we are currently living.</span></span></b><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is more a story of resignation than of survivalism. Some people are stockpiling, building shelters, making plans to escape the planet or somehow take shelter in a pod, or to shoot the asteroid down though that plan would only break it up into an even more lethal shower of asteroids. But more are either offing themselves or self-medicating and getting “high as satellites.” The dwindling police department does not enforce ordinances against smoking indoors or out and almost everyone smokes; or laws against open consumption of pot; and, in fact, it seems stopping any crimes is sort of optional and running drunks into the tank is what they do just for sadistic amusement.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Detective Hank Palace is the exception. He stays focused on his case. Though people are dropping like sandbag weights by their own hands, and a few more get killed during the course of the investigation, a man is </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">dead</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. There are the usual red herrings and it comes down to the usual motive: money. But this profit motive is for the survival of the progeny--the literal survival.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The underlying theme of the book is "why bother" and "what does it matter." So there's an overall winding down of civilization--shops closing, farming going fallow, gasoline drying up, services like internet and phone getting sparse and unreliable. This fallowness and desiccation is how I feel, but have attributed to getting older, and maybe to having lost my full-time job. I can’t bring myself to shop at Target: I don’t want to contribute to the economy. (I get annoyed watching the fashion segment on </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steven and Chris</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in which they gush that those fabulous boots are only $14! Idiots. They are that cheap because some Chinese wage slave made them at the end of an 18 hour shift. Plus, that leather was once some peaceful creature’s </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">skin</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.) I don’t want to follow politics or the news. I’ve followed long enough to know that we are on an irreversible course now. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I want to get off the grid, an idea that has intrigued me since I read </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Dove</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in high school, in which the teen sailor and his peripatetic lover end up, unfathomably, in a log cabin in the Montana woods. (What the heck did they talk about? By now they have probably either killed each other, their kids, a bunch of animals, and maybe a bunch more people too, or they are libertarians or survivalists.) I was puzzled that they could give up life by the sea, sailing from port to port, nakedness under the sun, to live as pallid, brown-haired, tree-hooded people. The retreat seemed lonely, crazy; yet other characters who have walked “into the wild,” like Christopher McCandless, have intrigued me, too. I love my home, my stuff: I’m a nester. Yet I want to do like the character in </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">White Noise</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and sweep tabletops of stuff, empty drawers, into a trash bag and get it away from me; have only clean surfaces. Downsize. I lived like Detective Palace as a grad student: mattress on the floor, old door as a desk. Then I took two carefully measured suitcases to Kuwait and even those didn’t arrive with me.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My mom at first kept all the things she needed right around her armchair. The clutter bothered me, but she needed her stuff organized and at hand. But that fell away over the months, til at the end she didn’t even need her glasses or hearing aid. She let go her flute, her fiddle, her crochet needle, her game of Spider on the tablet, the TV remote, her purse, her pill schedule, our Sunday radio shows, her walker, her potty chair, and eventually her diaper. She didn’t need them. She didn’t need her lip balm, her ice chips, her morphine, or me, to give her her morphine. Her heart held on to beating, and her chest to gasping in oxygen, until finally they stopped, and she didn’t need her body anymore. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A couple of places I bookmarked:</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 89</span></b><br /><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.5741965698543936" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I scowl. My sister, I believe, loves the fact that she can smoke pot now, that her policeman brother can no longer lecture her sternly about it. For Nico, I think, this is a silver lining. She takes a last drag and pitches the butt into the snow. I crouch down and pick up the doused stub of cigarette between two fingers and hold it in the air. “I thought you cared about the environment.”</span></b></div><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.5741965698543936" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“Not so much, anymore,” she says.</span></b></div><b id="internal-source-marker_0.5741965698543936" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 268</span></b><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There’s a bank of spherical lights over the main doors, and all were lit the last time I was here, and now two are out, and that’s just it. The world is decaying bit by bit, every piece degrading at its own erratic rate, everything trembling and crumbling in advance, the terror of the coming devastation a devastation of its own, and each minor degradation has its consequences.</span></b></blockquote><br /><div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Picasso image found at </span></b><a href="http://idlespeculations-terryprest.blogspot.com/2012/02/top-five-regrets-of-dying.html">http://idlespeculations-terryprest.blogspot.com/2012/02/top-five-regrets-of-dying.html</a></span></div>Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-47892738880864258532012-10-18T13:05:00.001-07:002012-10-21T07:59:50.890-07:00OWS, where are you? Obama is at least a little better than Mitt, so VOTE!<br /><h1 class="articleHeadline" itemprop="headline" style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 2.4em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.083em; margin: 0px 0px 8px;"><nyt_headline type=" " version="1.0">The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent</nyt_headline></h1><div><br /></div><div class="articleSpanImage" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 10px; line-height: 14.999999046325684px; margin-bottom: 8px; width: 600px;"><span itemid="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/10/14/sunday-review/14VENICE-SUB/14VENICE-SUB-articleLarge.jpg" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject"><img alt="" border="0" height="458" itemid="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/10/14/sunday-review/14VENICE-SUB/14VENICE-SUB-articleLarge.jpg" itemprop="url" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/10/14/sunday-review/14VENICE-SUB/14VENICE-SUB-articleLarge.jpg" width="600" /></span></div><br /><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">Read this brief, interesting article by Chrystia Freeland in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/opinion/sunday/the-self-destruction-of-the-1-percent.html?pagewanted=1&amp;_r=2&amp;ref=general&amp;src=me" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>. Like <a href="http://janiceadams.blogspot.com/2011/11/i-believe-costa-and-shermer-that-whats.html" target="_blank">Costa in her <i>The Watchman's Rattle</i></a>, Freeland notes the warning signs in an earlier economically thriving society, specifically that of 14th century Venice, and points out similarities to what we see happening now with our growing&nbsp;wealth&nbsp;disparity in the United States. She writes:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.999999046325684px; line-height: 21.999998092651367px;">That was the future predicted by Karl Marx, who wrote that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. And it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further — ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">To tax or not to tax:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.999999046325684px; line-height: 21.999998092651367px;">Even as the winner-take-all economy has enriched those at the very top, their tax burden has lightened. Tolerance for high executive compensation has increased, even as the legal powers of unions have been weakened and an intellectual case against them has been relentlessly advanced by plutocrat-financed think tanks. In the 1950s, the marginal income tax rate for those at the top of the distribution soared above 90 percent, a figure that today makes even Democrats flinch. Meanwhile, of the 400 richest taxpayers in 2009, 6 paid no federal income tax at all, and 27 paid 10 percent or less. None paid more than 35 percent.</span></blockquote><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.999999046325684px; line-height: 21.999998092651367px;">And the folly of underfunding public education:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.999999046325684px; line-height: 21.999998092651367px;">Educational attainment, which created the American middle class, is no longer rising. The super-elite lavishes unlimited resources on its children, while public schools are starved of funding.</span></blockquote><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.999999046325684px; line-height: 21.999998092651367px;">Where has the OWS (Occupy Wall Street) movement gone? Why isn't the 99%, let alone the 47%, mad as hell?</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.999999046325684px; line-height: 21.999998092651367px;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 14.999999046325684px; line-height: 21.98611068725586px;">This just added: Chrystia Freeman and Matt Taibbi on <i>Moyers and Company</i>:&nbsp;</span><a href="http://billmoyers.com/segment/matt-taibbi-and-chrystia-freeland-on-the-one-percents-power-and-privileges/">http://billmoyers.com/segment/matt-taibbi-and-chrystia-freeland-on-the-one-percents-power-and-privileges/</a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 14.999999046325684px; line-height: 21.999998092651367px;"><br /></span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4d4d; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;">Freeland, Chrystia . "The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent - NYTimes.com."&nbsp;</span><i style="background-color: white; color: #4d4d4d; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;">The New York Times - Breaking News, World News &amp; Multimedia</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d4d4d; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;">. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Oct. 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/opinion/sunday/the-self-destruction-of-the-1-percent.html?pagewanted=1&amp;_r=2&amp;ref=general&amp;src=me</span><br /><br />Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-6185104644652847052012-10-13T07:49:00.001-07:002012-10-13T08:55:34.957-07:00Alif the Unseen and Panetta's dire warning<img src="http://asiasociety.org/files/imagecache/centers_exhibition_preload/Sight-Unseen_0.jpg" /><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><b id="internal-source-marker_0.7438331262674183" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alif the Unseen</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (2012) by G. Willow Wilson</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hackers, trolls, bots, spiders, spyware, malware, updates, cookies, Halloween! Facebook friends--all the unseen in our lives today. Poltergeist. The Ghost in the Machine. The unseen represent threat to our lives more devastating than we could tolerate if we truly knew. We don’t believe in ghosts, though we see the stories on the news of identity theft, the woman who goes to the ATM and her new balance is $0.00. But, like cancer or Alzheimer's, it won’t happen to us.</span></b><br /><h1 dir="ltr"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.7438331262674183" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In yesterday’s news:</span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/world/panetta-warns-of-dire-threat-of-cyberattack.html"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Panetta Warns of Dire Threat of Cyberattack on U.S.</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></h1><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.7438331262674183" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“An aggressor nation or extremist group could use these kinds of cyber tools to gain control of critical switches,” Mr. Panetta said. “They could derail passenger trains, or even more dangerous, derail passenger trains loaded with lethal chemicals. They could contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country.”</span></b></div><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.7438331262674183" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Defense officials insisted that Mr. Panetta’s words were not hyperbole, and that he was responding to a recent wave of cyberattacks on large American financial institutions. He also cited </span><a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/connecting-the-dots-after-cyberattack-on-saudi-aramco/"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">an attack in August</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> on the state oil company Saudi Aramco, which infected and made useless more than 30,000 computers.</span></b><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b></div><span style="clear: left; float: left; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-i8gDVjMSG5s/T_RoJiWG3HI/AAAAAAAABJc/d1ww-rhqOh8/s1600/wtr_alif_the_unseen_rect-460x307.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-i8gDVjMSG5s/T_RoJiWG3HI/AAAAAAAABJc/d1ww-rhqOh8/s320/wtr_alif_the_unseen_rect-460x307.jpg" width="320" /></a><i>Alif the Unseen</i> is set in a state that has to be the UAE, though it is not named. This book springs from The Arab Spring (according to the author's epigraph), and culminates in a violent uprising against “State” and mob lynching of “The Hand,” State’s all-powerful internet service provider and security systems creator. The “unseen” are the hero, Alif, and his hacker cohorts, the veiled neighbor girl, and The Hand. But in this flipped <b id="internal-source-marker_0.7438331262674183" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Arabian Nights</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"> story there are also non-metaphorical unseen or actual </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">jinns</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">--a complement of diverse creatures--and the unseen version of </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">A Thousand Nights</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">, called </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Alf Yeom </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">or </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">A Thousand Days. </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Alf Yeom</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span></b><b id="internal-source-marker_0.7438331262674183" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">is the key to events,</span></b><b style="font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"> a magical book whose end story changes depending on who is reading it. </span></b></span><b id="internal-source-marker_0.7438331262674183" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alif (whose real name we learn, at the end, is Mohammed--hit dramatic chord </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">duh duh duh!</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) creates a powerful program that allows computers to recognize users by their human patterns, circumventing any attempt to sneak in using a new digital identity. That makes it hacker proof, and allows one to disappear from cyber life. He wrote it so that he could cut himself off permanently from a woman he loved, so that he would know for certain that she couldn’t find him so that he wouldn’t have to be tortured knowing for sure that she never looked for him. (I get that logic.)</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alif puzzles over the significance of </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alf Yeom,</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> which was smuggled into his hands, after which he became of the subject of a manhunt. He figures out that he can use it to build a new operating system based on organic logic, vs. zeros and ones. He codes in a frenzy, but the system, just as it is completed, collapses and he gets captured and thrown into prison. Gruesome prison scenes, but then he gets broken out by a rogue prince, and they all end up in the land of the </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">jinns</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, deep in the Empty Quarter, which they entered via a mirage.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The “unseen” aspect is played throughout the book: </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">jinns</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, hackers and computer identities, and veiled women. The unseen world is revealed as existing parallel to the ordinary, seen one we all know. The unseen are among us.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One reviewer blurb said “A multicultural </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Harry Potter</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for the digital age,” which is descriptive on the surface but doesn’t go deep enough. Another said, “A </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Golden Compass</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for the Arab Spring.” This book tells a magical tale, but, like the computer program Alif creates, it is composed of layers of meaning and metaphor. Muslims believe there are hundreds of names for God. Likewise, in Alif’s program, and in this book, each byte has multiple meanings.</span></b><br /><div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: normal;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Image of veiled </span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Afghan woman borrowed from </span></b><a href="http://asiasociety.org/new-york/exhibitions/sight-unseen-video-afghanistan-and-iran">http://asiasociety.org/new-york/exhibitions/sight-unseen-video-afghanistan-and-iran</a></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Alif the Unseen</i> cover and author image borrowed from&nbsp;<a href="http://tardiseruditorum.blogspot.com/2012/07/have-bonus-post-alif-unseen.html">http://tardiseruditorum.blogspot.com/2012/07/have-bonus-post-alif-unseen.html</a></span><br /><br />~</div>Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-86387648497974661062012-10-02T18:27:00.002-07:002012-10-02T18:27:35.203-07:00Contextless video snippetOwl pets dog.<br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/NJlyMFCX9CA" width="420"></iframe><br /><br />A great example of a riveting snippet of video with no story or context whatsoever. We watch fascinated but what do we learn?Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-5953827645913538522012-10-02T18:14:00.001-07:002012-10-03T07:18:28.801-07:00Excerpts and raw notes from Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason<b id="internal-source-marker_0.4815777116455138" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Notes on Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">May 2008&nbsp;</span></b><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[For Tanyss. Essay may follow someday...]</span></b><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A look at Anti-Intellectualism in American culture--historically, but according to Jacoby, also on the rise with the advent of computer and video culture. This topic caught my interest because I had noted an attitude of disdain, in youngers in my family, toward political discussion, reading newspapers and serious books, and anything "highbrow."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Way We Live Now: Just Us Folks</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">TV</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 11 "...the media restrict their audience's intellectual parameters not only by providing information in a highly condensed form but by filling time--a huge amount of time--that used to be occupied by engagement with the printed word." And "...in the early fifties, when many intellectuals had great hopes for television as an educational medium and as a general force for good."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 13 "It is sobering to reflect that during the next decade, as the oldest baby boomers enter retirement beginning 2011, the political and cultural leadership will inevitably pass to the first generation raised on television from Day 1." Funny she uses Hillary's&nbsp; campaign cautionary phrase. Obama will be the first president raised his whole life on TV. Reference here to Neil Postman's 1985 </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Amusing Ourselves to Death.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tech</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 17 Mocking defamation of the e-book as compared to a paperback--obvious, but dismisses the potential of carrying a library around on the one book-sized device. Also, she decries media "time-saving" and affect on memory: "The Internet is the perfect delivery medium for reference books and textbooks, which were never designed to be read from cover to cover. But a narrow, time-saving focus is inimical not only to reading for enjoyment but to reading that encourages the retention of knowledge." Has computer memory become a crutch that has weakened our human memory? And modularization too: "All mass media based on the entertainment model, emphasize "stand alone" programming that does not require a prior body of knowledge."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Way We Lived Then: Intellect and Ignorance in a Young Nation</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The dangerous place of education in a democracy</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 37 "The tendency toward specialization--to be sure, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand in the early nineteenth century--was closely related to the American insistence that education be tailored to provide direct practical benefits. The health of democracy, as so many of the founders proclaimed, depended on an educated citizenry, but many Americans also believed that too much learning might set one citizen about another and violate the very democratic ideals that education was supposed to foster."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 49 - historical support for American tradition of underfunding public education</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 53 - American resistance to centralized setting of educational standards: "Local control of schools meant not only that children in the poorest areas of the country would have the worst school facilities and teachers with the worst training but also that the content of education in the most backward areas of the country would be determined by backward people. In Europe, the subject matter of science and history lessons taught to children in all publicly supported schools have always been determined by highly educated employees of the central education ministries. In America, the image of an educated elite laying down national guidelines for schools was and is a bête noire for those who consider local control of education a right almost as sacred as any of the right enumerated in the Constitution."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 55 - American Lyceum Movement - "adult education" delivered by travelling experts: "One cultural development in harmony not only with Emerson's call for a new respect for learning on native grounds but also with the expanding democracy of the late 1820s and 1830s--the Jacksonian era--was the American lyceum movement.... By 1831, there were between eight hundred and a thousand town lyceums."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Social Psuedoscience in the Morning of America's Culture Wars</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 62 - damage of Social Darwinism theory as supporting rampant capitalism. "Then as now, the public was overwhelmed by information and misinformation filtered through new technologies. Many Americans possessed just enough education to be fascinated by late nineteenth century advances in both science and technology, but they had too little education to distinguish between real scientists and those who peddled social theories in the guise of science."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 71 "Because [William] Sumner was able to invest his pseudoscientific theories with scientific authority and an aura of rationality, in popular publications as well as scholarly journals, he must be ranked not only as one of the most influential academics of his day but as the philosophical forefather of the right-wing public intellectuals who have exercised similar influence in American society since the early 1980s."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Middlebrow Culture from Noon to Twilight</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 104 "The distinctive feature of American middlebrow culture was its embodiment of the old civic credo that anyone willing to invest time and energy in self-education might better himself....What has been lost is the culture of effort."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 105 "To be raised in a middlebrow family in the fifties meant that there were books, magazines, and newspapers in the house and that everyone old enough to read had a library card." Book-of-the-Month club, encyclopedias, and Great Books for learning.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 112 "Because middlebrow culture placed a high value on scientific discoveries and progress, its degeneration has played an important role in the melding of anti-intellectualism with the fundamentalist war on science during the past three decades."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 127 &nbsp;- decline of reading and writing for pleasure due to increasing influence of television: "Although few cultural observers saw it coming, all print media were already struggling to survive in the lengthening shadow of television."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 128 - "Masscult and Midcult" - "If Americans stopped buying&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Life</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Look </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">at some point in the sixties, it was not because they had paid attention to McDonald but because still pictures, even by some of the nation's best photographers, could not provide the excitement of film footage on television."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Blaming It on the Sixties</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 131 -&nbsp; "The conflation of these movement and cultural forces is a serious historical error, as is the premise that people in their late teens and early twenties were the most influential instigators of demands for social change. Irving Kristol could not have been more wrong when he asserted in 1977 in The New York Times Magazine that 'the radicalism of the 60s was a generational movement, bereft of adult models and adult guidance.'"&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 145 - Allen Bloom's conservative deductions and inaccuracies in&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Closing of the American Mind</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 147 - note to myself to read John Hope Franklin's </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mirror to America</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 160 - Nixon embrace of Christian right and Billy Graham.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Legacies: Youth Culture and Celebrity Culture</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Look at American ignorance of high art and academics, treating pop with equal seriousness to high art.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 169 - Jacoby spent 1969-71 living in Moscow: "The Russians I knew were true intellectuals--men and women who lived for ideas and beauty and cultivated both under great duress.... For a fortunate young American, free to come and go as she pleased, there was great value in living for a time in a world of scarcity, in which serious men and women, bound by external constraints unimaginable to most Westerners, sought and maintained inner freedom. My Russian years enable me, in fact forced me, to view many aspects of American society--especially its smug self-congratulation about liberties that were an unearned birthright for most citizens--from a very different perspective."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 173 "...Rafferty [60s Calif. Superintendent of Public Instruction] was either uninterested in or unable to imagine an art of music curriculum that emphasized classics, and California voters approved of his combination of anti-intellectual rhetoric and opposition to progressive education. Throughout the nation, the American tendency to value education only in terms of its practical results--a phenomenon as old as the republic--reasserted itself strongly in the "no frills" decisions of many local and state school boards.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Culture of Distraction</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The suck of pop culture.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 242 - newspapers truncating text to compete with video</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 243 - "Newspaper reading was a habit that accompanied the beginning or ending of each workday for millions; it did not constitute a continuous invasion of individual thought and consciousness.... Printed works do not take up mental space simply by virtue of being there; attention must be paid or their content, whether simple or complex, can never be truly assimilated. The willed attention demanded by print is the antithesis of the reflexive distraction encouraged by infotainment media, where one is talking about the tunes on an iPod, a picture flashing briefly on a home page, a text message, a video game, or the latest offering of 'reality' TV. That all of these sources of information and entertainment are capable of simultaneously engendering distraction and absorption accounts for much of their snakelike charm."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 244 - Jacoby questions the difference between IV and internet vis-a-vis passivity: "Many will object to the grouping of media products that appear on the interactive computer screen with products on essentially passive television and DVD screen, but the differences pale in comparison to an overwhelming commonality--the capability to deliver near-instant gratification through visual imagery."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">pp. 246-47 - Obvious truth tech-promoters (like me) don't want to acknowledge:&nbsp; "The computer way of life, which does include text as well as video and audio, exerts its most powerful pull through its instantaneousness. The advent of portable devices for viewing images and listening to music--often simultaneously--has expanded the reach of media even further, into the spaces in which people used to be alone, whether willingly or unwillingly, with their own thoughts.... The more time people spend before the computer screen or any screen, the less time and desire they have for two human activities critical to a fruitful and demanding intellectual life: reading and conversation."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 250 - UW study points out danger of any screen time to babies and toddlers (Nix to </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Baby Einstein</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">)</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 251 - Jacoby answers </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Everything Bad is Good for You</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> author's technophilial thesis: "...only reading is indispensable to intellectual life. The more sophisticated video games require intense concentration, but in the end, the cognitive reward for the master of the game amounts to little more than an improved ability to navigate other, more complex video games."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 253-54 - Educational use of video: "I suspect that the rewards...account for a good deal of the attraction; there is no incentive to keep reading a good novel, after all, other than the pull of the uninterrupted narrative. Moreover, in-game rewards do not merely offer encouragement; they also serve as interrupters, marking the end of one puzzle and the beginning of another: the reward itself is a distraction that provides novelty while allowing the player to remain within the game. (modularization?)</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"...The Federation of American Scientists (FAS)--an organization best known for providing advice to U.S. government agencies on national security issues--has called for greater federal investment in games that teach 'higher-order thinking skills such as...interpretive analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and adaption of rapid change.' One can only wish, if the scientists are right, that government officials had been exposed to such video games before they launched the war in Iraq. ...[more deflation of the video benefits argument]...I have little doubt, however, that within the next five to ten years, educational video games will become a classroom staple and reading will become even less popular among children who already prefer video to print." That is, UNLESS parents nation-wide forbid pre-mature screen-time and READ to their kids.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 261 - decline of book reviews in newspapers and decrying of blogging (her focus on literary blogs) as authoritative. "By downgrading book review sections, the papers are becoming complicit in the very phenomenon that threatens their survival: the decline of print culture." As a matter of fact, most of my book selections are made based on Seattle Times book reviews. (Yes, I know I need to get out more.) Having said that, I find the Amazon viral recommendation device to work fairly well, with its combination of editorial notes and accumulated reader reviews.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 263 - the nature of reading online--at least Jacoby's experience, though I think she is accurate: i.e. speed-reading and clicking ever forward to the next thing without much contemplation. Interesting observation, apparently her own as she doesn't cite any source: "If the information is important enough, I print it out and check it out with other, offline sources--a necessary precaution, since I found while fact-checking my last book that the error rate for online sources was triple the error rate for facts extracted from books."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Also, </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wired</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> on digital books and snippets: "[quoting </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wired</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">] 'At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves...the virtual library will encourage the creation of virtual 'bookshelves'--a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these 'bookshelves' will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages." [Here's Kevin Kelly's article online: </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&nbsp;See p. 4] I suppose this what I'm doing to Jacoby's book. And, how different is it from a research paper---sans the synthesis the aggregator does to create a new work, which is something he or she is then accountable for. See earlier postings on this blog about The Album and The Snippet.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Public Life: Defining Dumbness Downward</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 288 - 1960s American Intellectualism was synonymous with the political left.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 292 - right-wing think tanks: "That the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, et al., are also lofty perches for eggheads, that these right-wing think tanks have as incestuous a relationship to conservative government officials as Harvard ever did to the Kennedy administration, is largely unknown to the general public.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 293 - (is this a real title?) Elliott Abrams, Bush's national security adviser for "global democracy strategy." Wikipedia confirms:&nbsp;</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Abrams#Deputy_National_Security_Advisor_for_Global_Democracy_Strategy"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Abrams#Deputy_National_Security_Advisor_for_Global_Democracy_Strategy</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 305 - </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Time's</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> 2006 Person of the Year was YOU: "'citizen of "the new digital democracy,' could be anyone who ordered a DVD from Netflix; posted a profile on MySpace; visited TIME.com (for that you get extra points); sent an email; posted an image of himself or herself throwing up on YouTube; contributed a barbed obituary, cleverly designed to reveal the previously concealed sins of the deceased, to Legacy.com; googled a potential lover for a background check; or contributed to a political blog....</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"...As for the minds that richly deserve obscurity--minds responsible for the digital world's exponential growth of junk thought and bile--</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Time</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> assures its shrinking number of readers that everything on the Internet is part of a 'massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail.'"</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cultural Conservation</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The closing chapter</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 307 "It has become something of a literary convention for an author, at the end of a nonfiction book with an essentially pessimistic outlook, to propose solutions that, at least in theory, offer some basis for hope. But..."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 308 "In the triumphalist fervor of President Bush's first term, a White House aide had spoken contemptuously of scholars, scientists, and journalists--all those who 'believe that solutions emerge from a judicious study of discernible reality.'"</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">p. 310 - comments on "No Child Left Behind" as a non-solution that attempts to set a bar, but doesn't address the "vast racial, class, and economic disparities in American society. That children from more affluent homes can pass undemanding standardized tests does not mean that they are learning what citizens of a functional democracy need to know."</span><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jacoby says real political leadership is what is needed. "But it would take awesome courage for a candidate to say to voters: 'The problem isn't just that you were lied to. The real problem is that we, as a people, have become too lazy to learn what we need to know to make sound public decisions.'"</span></b>Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-86980439889505010312012-08-11T22:52:00.000-07:002014-07-02T15:07:02.405-07:00Surviving the tide: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood<b id="internal-source-marker_0.2103491930756718" style="clear: left; float: left; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSw1VF7gqNW80ZQFeS1w1R5NJ8EnMSjDqv2ioQgFLyofZ82eO8H" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">N<img border="0" src="https://encrypted-tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSw1VF7gqNW80ZQFeS1w1R5NJ8EnMSjDqv2ioQgFLyofZ82eO8H" /></a><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I could be a God’s Gardener...a fallow one. I’d like to think I could be Toby: a talker to bees, albeit an initially skeptical one. Atwood showed how people can practice a religion (cult, whatev), even become an elder--or an “adam” or “eve,” in the case of the GGs--without being sure in its faith, without being afraid to be unsure. What a name for an eve: Toby. Maybe that unisex name suited her though, as she was, as the kid Gardeners called her, the “dry witch,” and lived her Gardener life without a partner. Atwood’s story revises Genesis for our scary modern times, depicting the realization of all our current fears: social and ecological breakdown, repressive </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">irrelevant government, unleashed microbes, and mad science. She shows how far humans can stray from nature. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We get to know these characters: Toby, Zeb, Ren, Amanda, Adam One, etc., in the time before the “waterless flood,” for which the Gardeners are preparing by relearning horticulture in their demanding but peaceful rooftop garden, natural pharmacology/herbal healing (plant-based powders and potions, including poppy, willow, and honey), and the economy of recycling everything. They make everything they have out of discarded things the chldren “glean” off the streets and out of dumpsters. They make their soap out of soap ends thrown away by hotels, and vinegar, with which they disinfect everything, out of left-over wine. Their beds are made of old denim stuffed with straw, but how they devise their dark brown loose clothing is not described. But they are recognizable by it, and by their distinctive body odor, as they are expected to bathe only once a week, to conserve water. They are a money-less, no waste society, and they abhor eating meat. They teach the kids how to do so, though, as part of their survival preparation. Ultimately survivors do resort to eating maggots and making soup out of hooved legs. They ask forgiveness and give thanks to the creatures whose protein they ingest.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The world from which they have retreated is corrupted by rampant capitalism and society is collapsing. The Gardeners, despite their unwashed bodies, are taught to wash their hands after every contact with outsiders: they anticipate the pandemic that does eventually wipe out most humans in a flash, like a waterless flood. Only those who were shut away, either out of their own quick recognition of what was happening, or by force, like Ren, who was locked in a sort of time-out room, are not liquifidied by the virus. She was sealed in and had to be rescued by Amanda. The book’s lucky happenstance is that the Gardener friends do survive to form a band and fight for each other against remaining original human non-Gardeners who are hostile. Very hostile.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gene splicing is the mad science. That is what inevitably causes the outbreak--an experiment that escapes out of the lab and into the human population. Meanwhile, the animal kingdom has been augmented by hybrids: rakunks (raccoon/skunk), multi-colored Mo’Hairs (sheep used to farm hair for transplant to human heads), and liobams (lion mixed with lamb so that the predator and prey lie down together in the same body). There’s a new race of humans, too, as a result of a sex drug gone wild. But they are innocent and gentle and ultimately may be replacements for the original race of corrupt, violent humans. Maybe at the end the few survivors, including our resourceful Gardeners, will pass on the knowledge of good and evil to the childlike (even animal-like) blue-penis people and mix their genes with that race. There’s so much gene mixing going on, that’s sort of a given.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Atwood dances the story between the present--immediate post-flood time--and back to the start of Toby’s story, how she lost her parents, what society subjected her to, how she became a Gardener, and the stories of the other characters. Intersticed are Adam One’s sermons, always ending with “Let us sing,” and a rhyming hymn. The hymns are rather wonderful, and a forward note from Atwood tells that a composer, after publication of the book, set them to music, so they are available to hear.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is a masterful dystopia. Gentle in its focus on the Gardeners’ lives vs. a lot of depiction of &nbsp;the awfulness going on outside. More Aldous Huxley than <a href="http://janiasea.blogspot.com/2012/04/review-of-zombie-book-zone-one.html" target="_blank">Colin Whitehead</a>. And dead serious and feminist. It’s by Margaret Atwood, author of </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A Handmaid’s Tale</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, so...</span></b><b id="internal-source-marker_0.2103491930756718" style="clear: left; float: left; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Note: <i>The Year of the Flood</i> was written in 2009, recently enough for Atwood to have experienced the havoc wreaked by Bush and the banks and been scared enough to have consulted her bible, mayhaps.</span></b><b id="internal-source-marker_0.2103491930756718" style="clear: left; float: left; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Image</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> borrowed from </span><a href="http://www.ldolphin.org/flood.shtml">http://www.ldolphin.org/flood.shtml</a>. (I haven't read anything on this site so disclaim any connection to it other than shamelessly stealing this little jpeg from it.)</span></b><b id="internal-source-marker_0.2103491930756718" style="clear: left; float: left; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><b id="internal-source-marker_0.2103491930756718" style="clear: left; float: left; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b>Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-68604204377717079312012-06-08T13:12:00.002-07:002012-06-14T22:58:47.746-07:00What's scary about getting the news from HuffPo<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Z0GFRcFm-aY" width="420"></iframe><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Here's just the kind of info that I self-righteously want to have certain others read:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/07/earth-tipping-point-study_n_1577835.html?ref=mostpopular#s=1054132">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/07/earth-tipping-point-study_n_1577835.html?ref=mostpopular#s=1054132</a>. See? Are you worried now? Sorry you haven't been paying attention, or joined ranks with right-wing deniers? HuffPo says it's so--the crisis is so.<br /><br />You'll be especially scared when you read about all the endangered food, and&nbsp;<em>DRINK!&nbsp;</em><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/05/climate-change-food-extinction_n_1571034.html">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/05/climate-change-food-extinction_n_1571034.html</a><br /><br />But how often do I ask myself how&nbsp;trustworthy are sources such as this? I followed HuffPo's link to the Live Science web site. It's a dot com that is a member of Tech Media Network, a for-profit self-described blog with About Us pages showing its editorial staff, awards, partners, and advertising opportunities.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.techmedianetwork.com/company/about_us.html">http://www.techmedianetwork.com/company/about_us.html</a><br /><br />Checks out, I guess. Is it potentially any more biased than a peer-reviewed journal from an established research university or institution?<br /><br />That old question: what is a fact?<br /></div>Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-58253712316057314602012-06-08T07:55:00.002-07:002012-06-12T16:32:33.090-07:00I think Marshall McLuhan deserved his pop fame and would be a very fun person to transport into the 2012 tech enviro<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><br /><b id="internal-source-marker_0.3441840489394963" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Gutenberg Galaxy</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1962) by Marshall McLuhan</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s not that it’s an impenetrable read--not at all. It’s surprisingly accessible. (See amusing note on Elena Lamberti’s writing below.) The problem is that I am sure I won’t be able hold on to it for reference and regurgitation later. Maybe it’s my age. Or maybe it’s information overload, multi-tasking, global warming, whatever. In any case, that’s what this little bleview exercise of books I read is about.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I could do as I’ve been doing lately: marking with bits of torn-off Caffe Ladro napkin and little pencil arrows (not cool in library books), but it would take so much time. There are so many lucent passages, so many places to mark. And this material is all already woven into our cultural knowledge about technology and media. But here’s where the thought revolution started--McLuhan. He was pretty much a genius. So interesting to read Coupland’s bio--see bleview below--and learn what a resister he was. What would he be like if we could plop him down here in 2012? Would he see the logical extension of his theories in play? Certainly he would be befuddled by the things--like the internet--that he didn’t predict. Smart phones? Wouldn’t he love them? YouTube? Citizen journalism globe-wide?</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh, and the mosaic thing? </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Gutenberg Galaxy</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> has no table of contents, or menu, so you just have to jump in blindly to avail yourself of it. That would be random. I’ve been reading it linearly and finding that each headlined section is self-contained, but that it is also satisfying to read it in the traditional book way because the sections do build on each other to the extent that references to things repeat. Like the mosaic concept itself. It’s kind of like the idea of scaffolding in teaching.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m one quarter of the way through and have to return the book, to my surprise. I thought I’d be able to renew it since when I got it, it was in brand new condition--never had been read. But I guess this other person may have had the same idea as I had and came to it via Coupland. Maybe. Anyway, so far I’m with McLuhan about the experiential difference between accessing information aurally vs visually via print. He writes about how the work of pre-literate artists is two-dimensional and flat, and how oral/aural people respond to moving pictures (p. 44, “African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film."). The development of the symbol, from pictorial writing to our phonetic alphabet. It’s all gold, readable gold. I can see how McLuhan became to influential. I’m sure his lectures were a hoot.</span></b><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Arial;">Here's a 1967 TV interview in which he talks about LSD and <em>Finnegan's Wake</em>,&nbsp;"cool media," idiocy, and hints at&nbsp;the hive mind. He also points out the beatudes of Canada's political remoteness vis à vis global leadership: <a href="http://youtu.be/OMEC_HqWlBY">http://youtu.be/OMEC_HqWlBY</a></span><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I know I’ve dropped a lot of frags, but check the following out:</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">McLuhan’s book is relatively free of academese but one of the articles prefacing the new edition bodes ill for the linear reader. Good thing I stuck with the project and did test the waters of </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Gutenberg Galaxy</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> itself before gently dropping the book down the return slot. Here’s a sentence from Elena Lamberti’s essay, “Not Just a Book on Media: Extending The Gutenberg Galaxy.” (Promising title, huh?)</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br /><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.3441840489394963" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The density of the probe, its aphoristic and paratactic structure, as well as its connection to the paradoxical aim to counterbalance its brevity by encouraging a deeper and more engaging investigation. (sic) (p. xxx)</span></b></div><b id="internal-source-marker_0.3441840489394963" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes, the period really is there, and yes I copied it all directly. You will notice that Ms Lamberti got so wrapped up in her arcane diction and succession of clauses that she forgot to finish her sentence. Students, did you notice this is a fragment? LOL, to use the current vernacular. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bookmarked pages:</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">23-25 (erasing those light pencil marks now), 27 (under intriguing heading “Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy."), 29 ("Does the interiorization of media such as LETTERS alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?"), and 37 ("When technology extends ONE of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized.") (BTW, McLuhan did use end punctuation in those headings.) Last page read and next section: p. 54, “Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress.” Gosh, this is too much up my alley. Maybe I need to follow up on Coupland’s helpful Amazon page and order it online. Otherwise, I popped it right back on my Holds list. Meanwhile, I’m reading Nancy Kress’s </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dogs</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. More ZOMBIE APOCAPLYSE!</span></b><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">`</span></b>Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-74498300329967522492012-05-22T11:09:00.001-07:002012-06-07T22:51:35.252-07:00Also, Coupland's Generation Aand my list of questions:&nbsp;<a href="http://janiasea.blogspot.com/2012/05/couplands-generation-all-question-i.html">http://janiasea.blogspot.com/2012/05/couplands-generation-all-question-i.html</a><br />Cross-linking to my own other blog. Cheeky.Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-52014978458353430582012-05-18T20:08:00.003-07:002012-05-22T14:01:11.147-07:00Chinese, CSARS, Coupland & McLuhan's paper web<br /><div style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">&nbsp;<b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Two more I just read by Coupland: <i>JPod</i> and <i>You Know Nothing of My Work!</i></span></b></div><br /><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><br /><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><br /><a href="https://encrypted-tbn3.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRmo0RujqTlA-JUrVv32XIR63QnAUW8MMLDV7V3v4O89Xk4KGsu" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://encrypted-tbn3.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRmo0RujqTlA-JUrVv32XIR63QnAUW8MMLDV7V3v4O89Xk4KGsu" /></a><span id="internal-source-marker_0.5898151891306043"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">jPod (2006) </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">by Douglas Coupland</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wonderful read. Another book you don’t want to end. Typical Coupland graphic art interstices, including a lot of Chinese characters and text. Pages dense with numbers and the task to find one misplaced character--like searching for bugs in code. Also typical tight group of friends. How do they do it? Is it a geek thing? Counter-intuitive since Coupland posits in this book that all geeks are autistic to some degree and of one type or another, so the Kaitlan character builds a hug machine since autistics usually don’t like to be touched but need soothing by contact with textured surfaces. Ethan has hyper-acuity and is driven crazy by sounds. Kaitlin has mild facial blindness, and they all are sensitive to smells. When Ethan is in China, the polluted air has a nuanced and changing bouquet of burning tires and vats of dead rats among many other toxic odors. People are worried about SARS--the new CSARS (C for cat) and SARS Classic. It’s in the trip-to-China section that Douglas Coupland enters as a character in his own book, which, according to the story, he wrote based on the contents of Ethan’s laptop. He appears to be evil, but he lures all of jPod away from the game company they work for to work with him on his Dglobe.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">jPod are game coders with interesting names and back stories. Though none like Ethan with his family and associates. At the start of the book he has to help his mother bury a body. It goes on like that from page one. They are all very cheerful for the danger and trauma they go through, which is what makes it fun to watch. (Huh. I meant read.)</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A couple of things I bookmarked:</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1) If I ever travel again I must remember to look on top of the high TV armoire in my hotel room, if there is one. Company exec Steve who gets kidnapped to China and hooked on heroine enlightens us that it’s the place where guests chuck the stuff they don’t want to take with them, and it might include porn, foreign currency, leftover pot and pills, and even valuable but unwanted gifts. This from the Toblerone turn-around king, who is hence also an expert on mini bars.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2) In one of her Kwantlen College Learning Annex assignments, Kaitlan tackles “Describe Your Life Quickly” and nails, even in her twenty-somethings, the dull repetitiveness of it: “After a few years it just doesn’t matter,” and “The air smells like five hundred sheets of paper. And then it’s another day.” <a href="http://janiasea.blogspot.com/2012/04/review-of-zombie-book-zone-one.html" target="_blank">No wonder we want to read about the zombie apocalypse</a>--it sounds interesting.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My take is the resharpened epiphany (that I’m sure I’ve had before but that then faded away) that we western WASPS (of whatever creed, not necessarily just white, but middle class to wealthy) are oblivious to how much we are catered to by slaves. As Sri Lankan Abercombie and Fitch online sales employee Harj says, in the book <i>Generation A</i>, "Oh, to live the life of a Craig--a life of the gods! A heady blender drink of beer, casual American style and questionable morality." It’s hard to imagine as high a percentage of Chinese, compared to Americans, Canadians, and Europeans, ever attaining the level of materialistic pampering we “enjoy” now. We really need to stop buying cheap goods made in China, or rather, buying the throw-away stuff. And, all humanity need to drop what we’re doing and learn to cultivate the earth and eat only what we grow. There. Thanks again, Coupland.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! (2010)</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by Douglas Coupland</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span><br /><a href="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41rCYex6znL._SL500_AA300_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41rCYex6znL._SL500_AA300_.jpg" /></a><b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Biography. Good, readable, brought me into McLuhan’s era, but didn’t do enough to make me understand his work. As a result, very apt title. Coupland’s description of his writing, particularly of </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gutenberg Galaxy</span><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, made me want to read it, but with the same trepidation I have about re-tackling Stein’s <i>The Making of Americans</i>. Coupland showed the interesting contradiction that McLuhan hated technology yet was the first to analyze its place in evolving society so famously. Also, that he was a very linear man who wrote his books non-linearly, presaging how web sites would be read. Surely he was another somewhat autistic would-be-in-another-era geek.</span></span></b><br /><br /><b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><br /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For a real review, read NYT's one, by David Carr, cited below. </span></b></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yea, I agree this is a non-conventional biography, and it pops with enough about McLuhan's work to pique your interest. Maybe it assumes a certain familiarity, which I had from seeing&nbsp;</span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Annie Hall</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">&nbsp;and reading&nbsp;</span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Medium is the Massage</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> in college. (Wish I still had my copy, as I do a lot of my other textbooks, like </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Riverside Shakespeare</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">. It's like how I rue selling all my LPs back in the 80's.) Oh--as he does, Coupland sticks in graphic reproductions of Amazon book info for each of McLuhan's books as he is about to discuss it. Coupland's biography is chronological, but it still features that Coupland graphics magic with lots of different fun fonts and text sizes (but, lo, pinching outward on the page doesn't work to make it bigger like it does on my iPhone). The book delivers the McLuhan Essentials and I'm thinking Coupland is letting McLuhan's work speak for itself.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This article mashes up in here purty good:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2012/05/computer-programming-for-all-a-new-standard-of-literacy.php">http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2012/05/computer-programming-for-all-a-new-standard-of-literacy.php</a></span><br /><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><br /><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><br /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">NYT review by David Carr </span></span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/books/review/Carr-t.html?pagewanted=all"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/books/review/Carr-t.html?pagewanted=all</span></a><br /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Chinese character image borrowed from </span><a href="http://www.hanwords.com/collection.aspx">http://www.hanwords.com/collection.aspx</a></span>Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-79322543910326131942012-01-17T11:16:00.000-08:002012-01-17T11:58:30.076-08:00Can we eclipse the Apocalypse?: Jeremy Rifkin's The Third Industrial Revolution<br /><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--TZAu5RD3iM/TxXQk3lJ0_I/AAAAAAAAAVM/hHzitPlX0Ro/s1600/bookmark.fringe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--TZAu5RD3iM/TxXQk3lJ0_I/AAAAAAAAAVM/hHzitPlX0Ro/s320/bookmark.fringe.jpg" width="240" /></a><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8K7zfCmpXSQ/TxXSLqF-E4I/AAAAAAAAAVU/eA_QzX7oTWQ/s1600/intro.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><br /></a><b id="internal-source-marker_0.7308376759756356"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(2011) by Jeremy Rifkin</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is the must-read of the decline-of-western-civilization books I’ve been devouring lately. It provides the inkling of hope for the future that </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Watchman’s Rattle</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by Rebecca Costas fails to give. Rifkin shows how government and society are being restructured around the global environmental changes that we are already experiencing and the developing distributed capitalism that is replacing the old order. He gives solid examples of how the transition is already in motion.&nbsp;</span></b><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In future, each building, including our homes, will generate its own energy and sell surplus to the grid. Many people have already started doing this, including a neighbor down the street who installed a giant wind turbine in his front yard a couple of years ago. But in the book, Rifkin gives the example (on p. 175) of an African woman who sold one of her animals to buy a small solar panel from which she could charge her cell phone, and power a light bulb or two. This facilitated the minute-scale business she built that improved her family’s lives.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The chapter on distributed capitalism cites examples that are already up and running, such as &nbsp;Linnex, Etsy, Gramen Bank, CSA farming, and Zip Car. The idea of open source and free or micro-payment sharing is coming into play. Centralized distribution of goods is going the way of the Berlin Wall. Brick-and-mortar has had to move to etail too, to survive. Now sellers can sell directly to their customers with only a website as a middle man. If a culture of trust can be cemented, sharing can go even more local with such activities as car sharing (I could rent out my car to my neighbors, for instance) and already exists in the phenomenon of couch surfing.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8K7zfCmpXSQ/TxXSLqF-E4I/AAAAAAAAAVU/eA_QzX7oTWQ/s1600/intro.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center; white-space: normal;"><img border="0" height="233" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8K7zfCmpXSQ/TxXSLqF-E4I/AAAAAAAAAVU/eA_QzX7oTWQ/s320/intro.jpg" width="320" /></a></span><br />Click to enlarge<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rifkin is a true bleeding-heart rose-colored-glasses-wearing liberal who bases his theory of civil society on the empathetic nature of human beings. He says people seek community for the good of the whole. I’m not sure I see that, but rather feel that people will operate as a community, collaborate, for their own survival, as now they share for their own benefit or self-advancement. I’m not sure I agree with him that humans are such great beings, but I buy his paradigm of the Third Industrial Revolution because I can see it already getting underway. My consciousness is changing along with the community of which I’m a part, and I want to embrace the coming way of using energy, working, and sharing goods and services on my small scale. Like the Smart Car commercial says, instead of “BIG BIG BIG,” I want “small.” And local, like from here in my little house.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9eAi2FgXyHM/TxXNExaQy9I/AAAAAAAAAVE/ak4DAAM9cnE/s1600/3rd.Ind.Revolution.p128.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="246" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9eAi2FgXyHM/TxXNExaQy9I/AAAAAAAAAVE/ak4DAAM9cnE/s320/3rd.Ind.Revolution.p128.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Click to enlarge</div><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here are my notes:</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 130 - Seeing the Big Picture</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 178 - &nbsp;UAE’s </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Masdar</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, post carbon city<br class="kix-line-break" />P. 183 - Pacific NW’s PNWER</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 210 and 224 - “Biomimicry”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 216 - intellectual property in a lateral world</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 217 - a fossil fuel economy in the hands of a few giant corporations will seem odd to youth of 2050</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 218 - Financial Capital Versus Social Capital</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 219 - “sharing is to ownership...”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 221 - The Dream of Quality of Life</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 224 - “A new scientific worldview...”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 225 - “efficiency needs to make room for sustainability...”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 233 - The Most Outdated Institution in the World</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 235 - Biosphere Consciousness</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 251 - what is “awesome”?</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 253 - “How can we expect present and future generations to attend to the long-term stewardship of the biosphere, which requires focused attention and patience stretched out over lifetimes of commitment, when they are so easily distracted from moment to moment by a blur of signals, images, and data screaming out for their immediate attention.” (Reminded me of </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Super Sad True Love Story</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">)</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 265 - Rethinking Work</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 266 - “While the civil society...”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 267-268 - “Many of the brightest young people around the planet are eschewing traditional employment in the marketplace and government in favor of working in the not-for-profit third sector. The reason is that the distributed and collaborative nature of the third sector makes it a more attractive alternative for a generation that has grown up on the Internet and engaged in similar distributed and collaborative social spaces.... And like the Internet, the core assumption is civil society is that giving oneself to the larger networked community optimizes the value of the group as well as its individual members.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">P. 268 - “Just as the industrial revolutions...”</span></div>Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-71372612468253362562012-01-06T13:49:00.000-08:002013-02-05T00:27:05.997-08:00The Joy of Quiet... and of carrying a smaller purseI carry a big ass purse, to borrow Reggie Watts' phrase, so that I can always have room for a book and be able to&nbsp;accommodate&nbsp;a folded <i><a href="http://www.thestranger.com/" target="_blank">The Stranger</a></i>&nbsp; too. I usually have the day's crossword puzzle in there, and, of course, my iPhone with all its apps, mp3s, ebooks, and <b>the internet</b>.<br /><br />When I traveled in Yemen and other Middle Eastern and Asian countries a&nbsp;decade&nbsp;ago, I noticed that shopkeepers, <i>souk </i>vendors, and mostly everyone I saw squatting in public by their wares or shop doors sat with nothing in their hands to read. They maybe were chatting with a neighbor, chewing a big wad of&nbsp;<i>qat </i>leaves, or just staring into space, but they were placid in their non-distraction by book, Gameboy,&nbsp;TV, or even radio.<br /><br />I wonder if any of them now are checking their phones while eating communally on the floor, traditional-style. Or if <i>sheesha </i>smokers puff and peer at their devices in <i>Khan Al Kalili</i>. I guess they do.<br /><br />Pico Iyer, in his recent <i>NY Times</i> article, "The Joy of Quiet,"&nbsp;promotes the case, which is being&nbsp;ever more frequently made,&nbsp;for stillness and life offline. Here's a quote that also emphasizes the importance of education for information and media literacy and critical thinking:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px; text-align: left;">So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px; text-align: left;">.</span></blockquote><br />Here's the link:<br /><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-quiet.html?_r=3&amp;pagewanted=all&amp;smid=fb-share">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-quiet.html?_r=3&amp;pagewanted=all&amp;smid=fb-share</a><br /><br />and here's Reggie's Big Ass Purse video:<br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/8g1vEXz5BvA" width="420"></iframe> `Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-36037469801120513642011-12-19T12:36:00.000-08:002011-12-19T22:57:30.844-08:00Open-Sourced Civilization: the Beauty of Collaboration and Love of Self-Sustaining Work<br />People using their bodies and loving their work is a most beautiful&nbsp;manifestation of humanity. The honest sweat physicality of what these people who are innovating a new civilization do is what I so admire. Also, I love how they spurn the top-down traditional way of doing things that no longer work for whatever reason. This collaborative self-sufficiency facilitated by global networking is one of the signs that we are experiencing the transition into the Third Industrial Revolution (read Jeremy Rifkin's book!). Here's another guy out there figuring out new solutions and sharing them:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Marcin Jakubowski: Open-Sourced Blueprints For Civilization</span><br /><br /><object height="374" width="526"><param name="movie" value="http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf"> </param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/> <param name="wmode" value="transparent"> </param><param name="bgColor" value="#ffffff"> </param><param name="flashvars" value="vu=http://video.ted.com/talk/stream/2011U/Blank/MarcinJakubowski_2011U-320k.mp4&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/MarcinJakubowski-2011U.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=512&vh=288&ap=0&ti=1122&lang=&introDuration=15330&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=830&adKeys=talk=marcin_jakubowski;year=2011;theme=design_like_you_give_a_damn;theme=tales_of_invention;theme=the_rise_of_collaboration;theme=talks_from_ted_fellows;event=TED2011;tag=Culture;tag=TED+Fellows;tag=Technology;tag=open-source;&preAdTag=tconf.ted/embed;tile=1;sz=512x288;" /> <embed src="http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf" pluginspace="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" bgColor="#ffffff" width="526" height="374" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" flashvars="vu=http://video.ted.com/talk/stream/2011U/Blank/MarcinJakubowski_2011U-320k.mp4&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/MarcinJakubowski-2011U.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=512&vh=288&ap=0&ti=1122&lang=&introDuration=15330&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=830&adKeys=talk=marcin_jakubowski;year=2011;theme=design_like_you_give_a_damn;theme=tales_of_invention;theme=the_rise_of_collaboration;theme=talks_from_ted_fellows;event=TED2011;tag=Culture;tag=TED+Fellows;tag=Technology;tag=open-source;&preAdTag=tconf.ted/embed;tile=1;sz=512x288;"></embed></object> <br /><br />Source:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/19/wiki-diy-civilization_n_1157895.html" target="_blank">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/19/wiki-diy-civilization_n_1157895.html&nbsp;</a>Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-13649350703290069412011-12-05T13:30:00.000-08:002011-12-05T13:34:05.241-08:00"Wow": Tracking language development and the spread of mass conversationAlso&nbsp;Visualizing data. Wow.<br /><br />Deb Roy: The Birth Of A Word<br /><br /><object height="374" width="526"><param name="movie" value="http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf"> </param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/> <param name="wmode" value="transparent"> </param><param name="bgColor" value="#ffffff"> </param><param name="flashvars" value="vu=http://video.ted.com/talk/stream/2011/Blank/DebRoy_2011-320k.mp4&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/DebRoy-2011.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=512&vh=288&ap=0&ti=1092&lang=&introDuration=15330&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=830&adKeys=talk=deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word;year=2011;theme=words_about_words;theme=how_we_learn;event=TED2011;&preAdTag=tconf.ted/embed;tile=1;sz=512x288;" /> <embed src="http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf" pluginspace="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" bgColor="#ffffff" width="526" height="374" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" flashvars="vu=http://video.ted.com/talk/stream/2011/Blank/DebRoy_2011-320k.mp4&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/DebRoy-2011.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=512&vh=288&ap=0&ti=1092&lang=&introDuration=15330&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=830&adKeys=talk=deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word;year=2011;theme=words_about_words;theme=how_we_learn;event=TED2011;&preAdTag=tconf.ted/embed;tile=1;sz=512x288;"></embed></object>Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19873502.post-3803871169090896502011-11-17T23:00:00.001-08:002011-11-17T23:09:33.667-08:00Passing our Problems AlongCostas writes about the phenomenon of societies in decline passing their unsolvable problems on to the next generations. [<a href="http://janiceadams.blogspot.com/2011/11/i-believe-costa-and-shermer-that-whats.html" target="_blank">See post below</a>] Funny, I always do think I'll probably squeak through, but worry about my nephew and niece. I've noticed they don't seem worried.<br /><br />Listen to this guy--their age--on the subject of when he figures doom will descend:<br /><br /><br /><object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" height="441" id="ep" width="640"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /> <param name="movie" value="http://i.cdn.turner.com/v5cache/TBS/cvp/teamcoco_drupal_embed.swf?context=teamcoco_embed_offsite&videoId=20259" /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#000000" /> <embed src="http://i.cdn.turner.com/v5cache/TBS/cvp/teamcoco_drupal_embed.swf?context=teamcoco_embed_offsite&videoId=20259" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#000000" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="640" height="441"></embed></object><br /><br />(Sorry about the ads. Relatively new thing, but full on comparable to TV now. Yay progress on the internet!)<br /><br />`Janiaseahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01360678120909859445noreply@blogger.com0